War on Eroticism
So, those of you who are over thirty (anyone? anyone?) might remember the war on pornography prosecuted under the Reagan Administration, under the stern eye of Attorney General Edwin Meese III and his famous Commission. I don’t remember this, but that’s okay, since I can just watch it play out again today. Via 100 monkeys typing, we learn that Attorney General Alberto Gonzales is fashioning an anti-obscenity squad composed of FBI agents.*
Even if you do NOT recall, I trust most of you are familiar with the reaction of feminists to the Meese commission. That is, many feminists chose to side with the conservative Christian right and their censoriousness in decrying pornography, on the grounds that pornography was chauvinist and hateful towards women. The Meese commission, in fact, concluded that pornography promotes rape and sexual abuse. Many parties concluded that the Meese commission was full of shit and would have said just about any sort of lie in order to prove its point, and the fact that, you know, they didn’t actually perform any studies, and in fact brought in experts† to contradict actual studies that had been performed. However, many radical feminists of the Andrea Dworkin school of thought apparently didn’t attend those parties and continued to quote Meese’s bogus “research” favorably.
Andrea Dworkin is now dead, however, and hopefully others of her ilk are as well. This time, if a war flares up, I’m hoping feminists will ally themselves in favor of free speech and, well, sex. I happen to think being pro-sex is actually quite feminist, for reasons I think I’ve sketched out before. Women should be taking firmer control over their own sexuality (ideally with both hands). There’s certainly more room for this in a sexually liberal society than there is in a conservative one. On the other hand, the idea that women can’t have sex without being victimized (which is essentially what an anti-porn stance amounts to) seems decidedly non-feminist to me.
* We are late, as usual, on this observation, but the appeal of this blog has never been its timeliness. Or its trenchant insights, its wit or even its prolificacy. In fact, this blog has no appeal whatsoever.
† Sexperts? How often do you actually get to use that term? Okay, I know it’s not a real term. I already told you this blog lacks wit.
posted by saurabh in Uncategorized | 5 Comments